Donating to software projects - or, more accurately, open source projects. It's hardly new, it's hardly rare, and I'm sure most of us have donated at some point. That's probably why Canonical has opened Ubuntu up for donations - but with a twist.

"- making people release software that compile only on ubuntu by default"

Which ones? And what does "compile by default" means? Almost nothing "compile by default" on anything.

"- making people release software that only works on ubuntu (incl. proprietary software)"

Which ones? And why would it not work on another distro with the same libraries installed?

"- making unity"

A lot of people are using Unity and liking it. Probably more than all the arch users put together (and I'm one of them).

You're forgetting Launchpad (which is pretty big), Upstart, the Software Store, etc... but the biggest achievement is releasing every six months the most popular Linux distro, the only one ables to make the "mainstream" news and attracts commercial softwares.

I'm not using Ubuntu, but I won't insult everyone who use it and work on it just because it's not made for me.

"- making people release software that compile only on ubuntu by default"

Which ones? And what does "compile by default" means? Almost nothing "compile by default" on anything.

I guess he means software that relies for compilation on the patches that Ubuntu has applied to their packages.

"- making people release software that only works on ubuntu (incl. proprietary software)"

Which ones? And why would it not work on another distro with the same libraries installed?

This probably refers to dynamically linking against the Ubuntu version of some library. Other distros may not have the same version/soname which breaks dynamic linking.

Instances of both problems can be found easily via Google.

I'm not using Ubuntu, but I won't insult everyone who use it and work on it just because it's not made for me.

No one should belittle what Canonical has achieved. After all, Ubuntu has brought Linux to more people's computers than all other distros combined. However such a dominance is not without problems, as has been seen during the browser wars where websites were written with only MSIE in mind. Now we are in the situation that some Linux software is created with only Ubuntu in mind.